Some time ago I posted that altitude support was coming to Qiso within a few days, and that I’d post a demo. The implementation has been almost complete for weeks now, but there are a couple of glitches I need to resolve before pushing a release out and unfortunately I’ve just had other things to prioritise.
I’ve spent some time today though, working on some massive optimisation improvements and figured I’d throw together an HTML5 build to see how much of an impact this has had on the HTML renders. For me it’s actually running really smoothly so what the hell, seems a good time to show off the altitude support and simultaneously see how well it’s running for others =).
http://development.qweb.co.uk/qiso-html5/
Image masks don’t seem to be working properly in HTML5 so there are some rendering glitches while walking over tiles, but I’m planning to rewrite the mask creation stuff anyway to squeeze even more performance out, so that’s no biggy to be honest.
You can pan around by dragging, zoom in and out by pinching, and move the character around by clicking. The long grasses and water tiles can’t be walked over so make sure you’re clicking tiles where a path can be traversed.
You’ll likely notice that most of the time when you click, the character actually moves to the tile above where you intended it to. This is because the sprites are being rendered slightly above the tile origins (that’s the altitude system kicking in, which is for the hills really but on this map the base of the water tiles are actually altitude 0, so regular land tiles aren’t really base level either). This is the glitch I need to resolve before release but for the sake of this demo, just ignore it.
As for the altitude support itself - the way this works means that the same sprite can be used at any level. I.e. the flat green tile at the top of hills and the flat green tile at the bottom is the same sprite - not separate renders. This means that the spritesheet produced for this map can be used for maps with even taller hills, with other assets like the tall grasses placed at any height along those hills too.
Unfortunately this is something Tiled isn’t capable of replicating, so it’s a little tricky generating Tiled maps to import in now. For this reason, there’s also a Qiso World Editor coming soon - a sort of, Sim City style terrain builder where tiles can be raised or lowered and then saved out to a Qiso map ready to load straight in to your game. More on that soon!